I have several movie soundtracks that I classify consistently with Genre “Collection”, Album Artist “Soundtrack”.
When I loaded the La La Land soundtrack album into Roon, I did the same thing. This time it shows the whole album as one entity with multiple parts.
I then found that there is the ability to control how Roon handles this in Album Editor/Edit Album.
The problem is that when I tell Roon to NOT treat the album as one composition with 15 parts and just use the tag data, Roon says I cannot do that because my file does not have the data.
There is an Album Type, which is set by Roon to Soundtrack but the other choices make no sense to me.
I have 42 other soundtrack albums in Roon all with Album Artist as Soundtrack and Genre Collection and none of them has this issue. That suggests this might be a recent enhancement so pre-existing albums were not caught in the same net.
Any suggestions how I can get back to where I want to be?
Does anyone have suggestions?
Have you tried setting COMPOSITION/MOVEMENT tags on your files ?
No, I have not tried that tag(s) nor have I ever seen them before, nor are they being used by the other 3513 other files that are also ‘collections’.
So why this one and what is driving the behaviour in Roon so that I can stop it?
These files have no esoteric tags: Genre, Artist Name Album Artist, Album, Name, Date Added, Year etc.
The only thing that I can see that might make Roon treat this album differently is that the Album Artist is “Soundtrack” and the individual tracks have Artists that is not the same as Album Artist. That specific situation is shared with 823 other files that all display as expected in Roon.
In other words, this looks like unwelcome new behaviour in my experience of Roon.
Does anyone have any suggestion or this should just go into the list or trivial occurrences that should be ignored?
Hi Peter. Apologies for the delay.
As it’s only a single problem album, and assuming this album is local (not TIDAL), you can try the following:
For each track in the multi-part “composition”:
Create a file tag called WORK and populate it with, say, “La La Land”.
Create a file tag called PART and populate it with, say, “1”.
Create a file tag called WORKID and populate it with the track number.
The last tag basically tells Roon that the track is a different performance of the same “WORK” and “PART”.
An alternative strategy would be to turn the multi-part composition into many single part compositions using the following file tag strategy:
For each track in the multi-part “composition”:
Create a tag called WORK and populate it with the track title.
Create a tag called PART and populate it with, say, “1”, or even the track title again.
Create a tag called WORKID and populate it with the track number.
Hopefully this will sort things out for you. We are aware of the issue and are discussing how we might provide easy ways to sort this out. However, there is no correct answer: we need to make sure that we don’t break up all multi-part “art music”; and some people like film scores as single items.
Joel,
I do not see how you imagine that this can be the solution for why one CD is treated so differently from so many other compilation discs in Roon’s logic.
I understand from your response that this is just the way it is and good luck.
No problem - I do not expect any system to be perfect, even if I have come to higher expectations of Roon than others. The weak point of Roon is its strength: who gets to control the metadata and behaviour. I am an outlier and this is a glitch that is easy to ignore.
Peter
Hey @Peter_Davies1 – I think @joel asked me to follow up here a while back and I failed to do so. Blame me and not him 
I just wanted to refer you to my post here:
We are planning to make this easier, so hold tight – I’m not sure it will make the next release but hopefully it happens soon.
There is no blame, Mike.
It is only happening to one album so I can ignore it.
I do not use shuffle/radio at all.
I just see no reason why Roon should apply a hidden logic to treat one ‘collection’ album differently than the other 300 ‘collection’ albums in Roon.
I am a fan of consistency, which is why I groom my own data and I also believe that if Roon is going to impose its logic on certain albums then it should give the user a simple way to reverse that logic to its base case. “Shuffle as Work, Part or exclude” would make a pretty simple switch at the album level.
Good luck.
Peter
@mike @joel I was wondering wether you guys already simplified this issue. I am currently having the exact same issue with a classical album where Roon is summarizing all the concertos as one and lists all parts individually when instead I want all concertos (works) separated with their respective parts.
I have two different MacOS programs (Tag Editor and Meta) that allow me to edit metadata but neither of them allows me to create or edit the Work and Part tags…
It would be greatly appreciated if you guys could help me out.